Bought and Sold. Megan Stephens
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sister do the heavy-duty housework that they taught me to do their way, with often unconcealed disdain for my lack of knowledge.
Jak’s parents slept in the only proper bed in the house, and every day the mattress had to be lifted off it, carried outside and beaten with a sort of carpet beater made out of cane and shaped like a tennis racquet. Then the mattress was left to air before being put back on the bed again, topside down. On most days, all the sheets and bed covers were hung out to air too, except on wash days, when they had to be taken out into the garden to be scrubbed and rubbed in freezing cold water in a metal tub until your knuckles were raw and bleeding.
However hard I worked, it seemed that I could never do anything the way some unwritten law stated that it must be done. One day, after I had struggled to lift something that was way beyond the limits of my strength, Jak’s mother clicked her tongue and said something to Jak, which he translated for me as, ‘English girls are very dirty.’ It seemed unfair, as well as irrelevant to the current task. What hurt me most of all was the fact that Jak’s tone of voice suggested he might agree with what his mother said.
Ever since I was a very small child, the thing I think I wanted more than almost anything else was for people to like me. So I particularly hated being around Jak’s dad, because he made no attempt at all to hide his impatient dislike of me. Whenever he walked into a room and found me there, he would glare at me, make angry clicking noises with his tongue and then say something unmistakably nasty in Albanian before walking out again. It might not have been because he was irritated with me personally, however. He wasn’t much nicer to his wife, who he continued to bully even now that she was ill.
At every mealtime, everyone would sit down at the table while Jak’s mum served the food and then stood up to eat hers. When it happened the first time, I jumped up and offered her my chair. She glared at me as though I had done something contemptible, and glanced anxiously at her husband, who muttered something angry, and Jak almost shouted at me, ‘What do you think you’re doing? She stands up.’ I seemed to have done something insulting in some way I didn’t understand and I felt really embarrassed. So I asked Jak later, ‘Why do you let your dad treat your mum like that? I don’t understand why a man would make a woman stand up to eat. That doesn’t happen in England. Everyone sits at the table together.’
‘It’s the Albanian culture,’ he snapped at me. ‘In Albania, wives love their husbands and husbands love their wives. Perhaps that’s something that doesn’t happen in England either. In Albania women do everything for their men. That’s what we call family.’ I realised I didn’t have enough normal family experience to be able to argue with him. But it seemed to me to be a very strange way to treat someone you loved.
As the days passed, I became more and more miserable, until eventually I told Jak I was unhappy living with his family and asked him if we could get a place of our own. It felt like proof of his love for me when he agreed, and a couple of days later we moved out. The one-room apartment Jak rented for us was tiny, although I think by that time I would have been happy living in a shed or a tent as long as it meant not having to put up with his family’s disapproval and the constant feeling that I wasn’t good enough in almost every way.
It was shortly after we moved into the apartment that I began to see the first glimpses of another side of Jak. Perhaps it was the side of him my mum had thought she could see in his face and in the ‘hardness’ in his eyes that prompted her – and Dean – to try to persuade me not to fall for him.
Jak and I had had some loud, shouted arguments, but nothing worse than the sort of rows I used to have with my mum and sister. After we moved into the apartment, however, he would sometimes be moody when he got home from work and would get angry about apparently trivial things – for example, if his dinner wasn’t on the table as soon as he walked through the door. ‘That’s the Albanian way,’ he would tell me. So, because I loved him and because I wanted him to love and approve of me, I told myself he was right and that ‘the Albanian way’ was indeed the best way of doing things.
During the time we were living with his family, Jak’s mum used to tell me to ‘watch and learn’ while she cooked, and after we moved out I tried to remember how to make the meals she made. One day, I decided to make a sort of soup-stew she used to make out of rice, spinach, boiled chicken and lemon. There was no kitchen in the apartment, just a sink and a small, two-ring electric hob in one corner of the room that was also our living-room/bedroom.
I was stirring the food in a pot on the hob when Jak got home from work. I could see he was tired and hungry. But nothing could have prepared me for what happened next. I had just picked up a ladle and was about to transfer the soupy stew into two bowls when he said, with a terseness that took me by surprise, ‘Leave it. I’ll do it myself.’ Dipping a spoon into the pot, he tasted the food and then stood there for a moment, still holding the spoon to his lips. It was as if every muscle in his body had frozen and when he did finally turn his head to look at me, there was a horrible expression on his face I had never seen before and couldn’t interpret. I had expected him to be pleased because I’d tried to make something his mother used to make, something I knew he really liked. I couldn’t think of any reason at all why he might be as angry as he clearly was. But suddenly my palms were sweating and I felt sick.
Turning very slowly away from the little stove, Jak shouted, ‘You don’t even know how to cook! Have you learned nothing from my mother?’ And he picked up the pot and hurled it across the room.
It smashed against the wall just above my head, its boiling contents spewed out in every direction. As I pulled off the stew-spattered cotton top I was wearing, I screamed at him, ‘What are you doing? Are you crazy?’ I was so shocked that although my whole body was shaking, I didn’t cry at first. Then, like a child suddenly realising she’s out of her depth in some way she doesn’t understand, I began to wail, ‘I want to go home. I want my mum.’
It was as if a switch had been flipped inside Jak, shutting off his fury and turning on his anguished tears. ‘I’m sorry,’ he kept saying. ‘I’m so sorry. I don’t know what came over me.’
‘I don’t care,’ I shouted at him. ‘I want my mum.’
‘No, please, I’m sorry.’ He took a step towards me with his arms outstretched. ‘I will teach you how to cook. It’s all right. I’m not like that. It’s just that I’m so worried about my mother. I’m upset because I can’t do anything to help her.’
Fortunately, apart from a few patches on my back, I wasn’t badly burned. After I had washed all the chicken, rice and spinach out of my hair and changed my clothes, Jak took me out for a meal. When we had eaten, we drove up into the mountains on his motorbike, where we sat together on a rock at the side of the road, talking and looking down on the flickering lights along the coast. Jak pointed at a cluster of stars and said, ‘Those are our stars. Whatever happens in the future, wherever you are, you can look up at those stars and know that I am looking at them too, and that I’m thinking about you.’ And by the time we drove back down the mountain in the darkness, he had soothed my anxieties and reclaimed my trust.
A few evenings after my attempt to make a nice meal for Jak had ended so badly, we were sitting outside a café drinking coffee when he asked me, ‘How would you feel about working? If you were earning money, we could pay for the treatment my mum needs, then buy a car and start saving for our own house. We’ll need a place of our own if we’re going to have children.’
I wasn’t yet 15, and Jak and I still hadn’t had sex, but the thought that he loved me and wanted us to have a family made me incredibly happy. Because of Jak, I was going to be able to put my own turbulent childhood behind me and, in effect, start my life again.
‘I would love to work,’ I told him. ‘I don’t know what I could do, but, yes, definitely.’
‘Oh, there are lots of jobs you could do,’ he said. ‘You could do cleaning, or waitressing, or …’
‘I’ve